Pytheas Online

An examination of issues of civilization and conflict.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Arafat Dies

A man who betrayed his people and slaughtered thousands of innocents, all the while enriching himself and inflating his ego. Truly, the Che Guevara of the Arab world. What more needs to be said? (Actually, Jeff Jacoby summarizes it well enough.)

The French sent Arafat's corpse off with ceremonies befitting a head of state. Well, of course they did. He killed (mostly) Jews; I'm surprised they didn't declare a day of national mourning and pin the Legion of Honour to his chest.

President Bush, upon earlier, premature reports of Arafat's demise, said, "God bless his soul." I suppose nothing more could be expected from someone as intellectually muddled, ideologically confused as George Bush. The proper U.S. response should be a pointed silence.

Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, practically fell over himself to eulogize Arafat. "He was the father of the modern Palestinian nationalist movement. A powerful symbol and forceful advocate. Palestinians united behind him in their pursuit of a homeland," Mr. Carter said in a released statement. No surprise here. Jimmy Carter's presidency demonstrated the man's moral and geopolitical incompetence; during his post-White House career he has traipsed about the globe eagerly sidling up to every Third World mass murderer willing to pose with him for a photo-op.

[Ms. Chang's] agent Susan Rabiner said she suffered a breakdown during research for her latest book about US soldiers fighting the Japanese in the Philippines.
She continued to suffer from depressesion after leaving the hospital, and in a note to her family asked to be remembered for the person she was before she fell ill.
The late historian Stephen Ambrose described Chang as "maybe the best historian we've got."

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Bush Rushes to Surrender Southern Border

It should come as no surprise that a freshly re-elected President Bush is moving to revive his 2003 immigration proposal to "relax the rules against illegal immigration." When the president unveilled his plan last year, it fell like lead on the Senate floor, with GOP Senators scurrying out of the way lest they be tainted by it. Leading Republican Senators quickly declared the president's plan dead on arrival, sparring the president's re-election effort from a self-imposed hatchet wound to the head. But it appears that President Bush continues to stand behind the idea that the U.S. doesn't deserve borders and that any Mexican who wishes may come across the border to poach employment from the failing grasp of some worthless American worker.

"We are formulating plans for the legislative agenda for next year," said White House political strategist Karl Rove. "And immigration will be on that agenda."
He added: "The president had a meeting this morning to discuss with a significant member of the Senate the prospect of immigration reform. And he's going to make it an important item."
While the president was huddling with Mr. McCain, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was pushing the plan during a visit to Mexico City.

Not all Republicans, however, are eager to embrace the annhilation of American culture and the demise of the nation's borders.

But key opponents in Congress said Mr. Bush's proposal isn't going anywhere.
"An amnesty by any other name is still an amnesty, regardless of what the White House wants to call it," said Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican and chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus.
"Their amnesty plan was dead on arrival when they sent it to the Congress in January, and if they send the same pig with lipstick back to Congress next January, it will suffer the same fate," he said.
With the House and Senate already clashing over border security and deportation provisions in the pending intelligence overhaul bill, some Capitol Hill aides said it's almost impossible that Congress could agree on a broader immigration proposal.

Hilariously, some experience surprise at the president's move:

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said he "suddenly went from calm to stressed out" after learning of the president's renewed push for immigration relaxation.
He predicted the plan would continue to meet vigorous opposition from House Republicans.
"If the House wouldn't deliver this bill before the guy's election, when he claimed he needed it for the Hispanic vote, why would they deliver it after the election, when their constituents overwhelmingly oppose it?" he said. "Why would House leaders follow the president over a cliff?"

On what planet does Mr. Stein live? If the president was willing to propose relaxing border control via a stealth amnesty after September 11, 2001, how could anyone misjudge his intentions? The president isn't moving this proposal along because it's some slick, calculated ploy for Latino votes - he actually believes in this.

Mr. Stein said Mr. Bush is already a "lame duck president" whose proposal "has no credibility." He expressed astonishment that the president resurrected the plan before pushing other second-term agenda items, like tax simplification or Social Security privatization.
"There's a sense of obstinacy in the face of overwhelming evidence that it's a losing approach," he said. "I mean, the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing, expecting a different result."

But the White House has a completely different agenda and outlook:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the president wants to "provide a more humane treatment" of illegal aliens from Mexico.
"America has always been a welcoming society, and this is a program that will match willing workers with willing employers," he said. "It will promote compassion for workers who right now have no protection."
He added of Mr. Bush: "It's something that he intends to work with members on to get moving again in the second term. It's something he believes very strongly in."

Yes, it's the Mexican illegals who evoke compassion and concern from this administration - not the American workers who will see their wages collapse from new inflows of immigrants desperate for employment at any price - and certainly not the millions of Americans who will feel less and less at home in their own country as they hear Spanish spoken in every store and restaurant and on the street and as Spanish-language radio and TV stations fill the air. But their views don't really matter anyway. Only the immigrants do. That's why there will never be a popular referendum on the issue - and why any statewide iniatives like the recent ballot in Arizona will be contested by the federal government. What Americans want doesn't matter. Americans no longer count in Washington DC.

If conservatives find themselves astonished by this turn of events, they have only themselves to blame. President Bush has repeatedly broadcast his position on immigration, just as he has betrayed virtually every other conservative principle from fiscal responsibility to avoiding Wilsonian international adventures. But conservatives flocked to the polls to re-elect a man whom they liked, even at the price of everything they once believed. They have only themselves to blame for what is to come.

Like Europe, America has now embarked on the wholesale importation of massive numbers of people who do not share its language, customs or culture. The result can only be economic dislocation, burgeoning native resentment and concommitent ethnic and cultural balkanization as many of the new immigrants settle in communities of their peers and see no reason to assimilate into the broader culture.

The attacks have scratched the patina of tolerance on which the Dutch have long prided themselves, particularly here in their principal city, where the scent of hashish trails in the air, prostitutes beckon from storefront brothels and Hell's Angels live side by side with Hare Krishnas. But many Dutch now say that for years that tradition of tolerance suppressed an open debate about the challenges of integrating conservative Muslims.
Jan Colijn, 46, a bookkeeper from the central Dutch town of Gorinchem who was at the funeral Tuesday night, complained that the Netherlands' generous social welfare system had allowed Muslim immigrants to isolate themselves. Because of that, "there is a kind of Muslim fascism emerging here," he said. "The government must find a way to break these communities open."
Another man, who declined to give his name, was more succinct: "Now, it's war."
For many years, such criticism of Islam and Islamic customs, even among Dutch extremists, was considered taboo, despite deep frustrations that had built up against conservative Islam in the country.

The sad state of affairs is the direct result of the incredibly foolish policy of permitting mass migration from an alien culture - a culture that embraces none of the tolerant, democratic values of the Dutch people. The importation of so many representatives of that alien culture - especially, a culture known not only for its difference, but for it's militancy - set the stage for an inevitable clash between the new immigrants and the native population. No people will sit by blindly and remain "tolerant" while they are destroyed. This is not a clash defined by race (though the Dutch do represent a distinct ethnic group as do their Muslim - mostly Arab - antagonists), it is a cultural confrontation, a clash of civilizations, to use Samuel Huntington's formulation. Two groups now occupy the Netherlands: 1) the native Dutch together with individuals of any race who are willing to live by traditional Dutch social standards, and 2) a sizable proportion of Muslim immigrants (but certainly not all) who despise Dutch society and Western values and wish to tear it all down. The ability of the two groups to co-exist despite the gaping chasm of their cultural differences could last only as long as both restrained the temptation toward violence. Once one side adopted violent aggression as a mechanism for intimidation, a backlash was guaranteed.

Many here say that began to change after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, when the Netherlands, like many countries, began to consider the dangers of political Islam seriously. The debate fueled an anti-immigration movement and helped propel the career of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered by an environmental activist shortly before national elections in 2002.
By all accounts here, Fortuyn's murder removed any remaining brakes on the debate surrounding immigrants.
"After Pim Fortuyn's murder, there were no limitations on what you could say," said Edwin Bakker, a terrorism expert at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations. "It has become a climate in which insulting people is the norm."

Mr. Bakker's remarks seem to lay the blame for the current sitation at the feet of the slain Mr. Fortuyn. This, of course, misses the point by using all the intellectual evasion and denial of reality that got the Netherlands into this mess in the first place. The "limits" on public discourse that Mr. Bakker seems to so approve of were the very limits that choked off any debate over immigrations policies that admitted so many individuals hostile to Dutch culture. Had there been a frank debate - had the issues been weigh dispassionately - with any eye toward what policies benefitted the Netherlands, which policies advanced Dutch interests, Muslim immigration might have been curtailed before the largest numbers reached the Netherlands. Or, at least, the arriving immigrants might have been better screened and surveilled, so that militants could have been denied entry or quickly weeded out once they arrived. But no. The only "discourse" permitted prior to Mr. Fortuyn's murder was unqualified acceptance of immigration and the unquestioned declarations that all immigrants were peaceful and productive, especially Muslims. Any deviation from that script led immediately to charges of "racism," "imperialism," "xenophobia" and the rest of the usual leftist cant. There is some satisfying irony that the Islamists will slaughter the leftists (with their blasphemous and impious bohemian lifestyles) first.

But the left never learns...

There are about 300,000 people of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands today, and the ratcheting up of the anti-immigration debate has alienated many of them from Dutch society and, many people argue, has also helped fragment the Muslim community.
Jean Tillie, a professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam, says that the debate has broken down a network that connected even the most extremist Muslim groups to the more moderate voices within the Muslim community. He cited an Amsterdam government advisory board that brought together all kinds of Moroccans and fostered communication and cohesion within the Muslim community.
"Those groups participating didn't agree with each other, but they met together with the collective mission of advising the city government," he said.
The board was abolished a year ago, he says, in the wake of the anti-immigration debate. He claims that funds for other ethnic organizations have shrunk and outreach policies have also been abandoned.

Ah, yes, Ms. Tille, the problem here is the Dutch themselves, not the Muslims. Never the Muslims. The Muslim youth have been "alienated" by the talk of restricting immigration, and thus have turned to the Islamist recruiters already working amongst them. Yes. You see, in Ms. Tille's view the Dutch have no right to control their own country - since, being worthless Europeans, they are inherently morally corrupt - and so any effort to even discuss the merits of open immigration rightfully incites the Muslims to murder and terror. Of course, one wonders how Ms. Tille would explain the Islamist violence now killing and maiming innocent victims in the Phillipines, Thailand, China, India, Sudan, Nigeria, Bali, Indonesia, etc. But no doubt she'd find an explanation that excused Islam and laid the blame squarely on someone descended from Europeans.

At El Tawheed mosque, considered by many people here to be the epicenter of extremism in Amsterdam, Farid Zaari, the mosque's spokesman, argues that pressure from the debate has hindered the Muslim community's ability to control its radical youth.
"If we bring these people into the mosque, it is possible to change their thoughts, but few mosques dare to because if you do, you're branded," he said.

Of course, even discussing the problem admits that it exists, and Mr. Zaari would rather the Dutch simply ignore what is going on in their cities and towns. But Mr. Zaari's assertion that bringing the "youth" into the mosque for pacification are belied by certain inconvenient facts:

Dutch media reports insist that van Gogh's killer attended the mosque, and though Zaari says the mosque has no record of his ever being there, he said that political leaders and the media should encourage the mosque to reach out to the community's radical youth, rather than stigmatizing it for doing so.
The mosque was previously associated with a Saudi-based charity, Al Haramain, which American and Saudi Arabian officials accused earlier this year of aiding Islamic terrorists. The mosque has since severed its ties with the charity, but more recently it has been criticized for selling books espousing extremist views, including female circumcision and the punishment of homosexuals by throwing them off tall buildings.

Oh, yes. By all means, let's get the youth in there. Because nothing is as consonnant with Western values and Dutch society as mutilating female genitalia and hurling homosexuals off tall buildings. Clearly, the Dutch need to encourage greater attendance at Mr. Zaari's mosque, but only if they want full scale civil war.

The minister, whose nation holds the E.U. presidency, said countires must ensure taht immigrants learn the local language and accept Western values, but she said the E.U. also needed to develop, in her words, a common vision of integration.
Last week E.U. leaders agreed to create a common asylum system by 2010 to try to prevent illegal immigration into the E.U.

If the oh-so-politically-correct leaders of the European Union think they can "integrate" Islamists into their culture, they have a most unpleasant surprise ahead of them. A surprise underscored by the destruction of a small mural painted by artist Chris Ripke in the wake of Theo van Gogh's murder. Mr. Ripke's mural featured a stylized dove with the words "Gij zult niet doden" ("Thou Shalt Not Kill") emblazoned across it. This would seem to be a perfectly responsible, restrained plea in the aftermath of Mr. van Gogh's brutal murder. But apparently not...

So local Muslims considered "Thou Shalt Not Kill" offensive. Why? Because it ran counter to their actual beliefs? How this could be considered racist defies reason and seems more like a bit of leftist-speak which the local Muslims have learned to spit out rather like a parrot repeating a expletive uttered once-too-often in its presence. The Islamists have educated themselves in the argot of the left and know how to use its obscurant language to mask their own motives and frighten their opponents. In fact, judging by the left's failure to condemn Islamic violence, and indeed its willingness to describe Islamic terrorists as "freedom fighters," it appears that the left, having marinated itself in a deep hatred of Western Civilization for decades, is actually embracing Islamism, even at the inevitable price of the left's own demise at the hands of its new Islamist allies.

Native Europeans are unlikely to consent to being overrun in their own countries any more than non-Europeans happily accepted colonization by Europeans. Sadly, violent resistance is the only realistic outcome, with militancy escalating on both sides. This had led some observers to wonder if some form of apartheid society will emerge in Europe, with recent immigrants isolated into a perpertually hostile underclass. Such a situation would be inherently unstable and would quickly threaten to erupt in genocide or bloody civil war. Europe's best bet is to integrate those among the immigrants who are willing to surrender their culture for Europe's, deport the remainder, and close its doors against any further waves of immigrants.

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Madonna does Geopolitics

"Global terror is everywhere. Global terror is down the street, around the block," she said. "Global terror is in California. There's global terror everywhere and it's absurd to think you can get it by going to one country and dropping tons of bombs on innocent people."

Global terror is 'down the street, around the block'? Really? Does Madonna live near a mosque?

The city has large North African and Orthodox Jewish minorities. It has seen a spate of anti-Semitic attacks recently, while a radical Arab group has been staging vigilante patrols of North African neighbourhoods.Two opinion polls last month placed the Vlaams Blok as the most popular party in the region, ahead of the Christian Democrats, after it came second in June regional elections.
In national elections in May last year, the Vlaams Blok posted the best performance in its 26-year history by gaining three more seats in Belgium's 150-seat parliament to take its tally to 18.
But despite its poll success, the Blok has been kept out of power by a political "cordon sanitaire" of isolation by mainstream parties.

AFP reports that the Blok's leadership remains underterred and will relaunch the party under the new name "Vlaams Blok+" or "Vlaams Belang" (The Flemish Interest).

"What happened in Brussels today is unique in the Western world: never has a so-called democratic regime outlawed the country's largest political party," Vlaams Blok leader Frank Vanhecke said in a statement.
"Today, our party has been killed, not by the electorate but by the judges.

The BBC quoted Mr. Vanhecke comparing his party's censure to that of formerly communist eastern Europe where the state ideology permitted no other ideas.

"Exactly 15 years after the Berlin Wall came down and the people of East Germany and eastern Europe regained their freedom, it was confirmed today that in the Belgian state, democracy and freedom of speech are under threat," he said.

Mr. Vanhecke's sentiments can hardly be faulted. While one might argue with some merit that Europeans, after two devastating world wars, have an interest in mitigating nationalist impulses, declaring any anti-immigration stance to be racist on its face defies logic. Worse, it destroys any reasonable balance that arguments over immigration can attain through debate and argument. Cannot the average Belgian survey the facts as he sees them and come to the conclusion that his country is not improved by admitting ever larger numbers of foreigners whose countries without being immediately branded a "racist." What about non-white Belgians who might agree with such conclusions? Are they "racists" as well? Whatever happened to freedom of conscience, not to mention speech, in Belgium?

The answer, of course, is that the same leftist-elite mindset that pervades much of the politics of immigration in the U.S. has also manifested itself in Europe, where it has found even more fertile soil in which to propagate. This line of thought begins with the premise that Europeans are racist and concludes that any effort to advance the interest of Europeans must logically be racist as well. Since racism is the worst crime imaginable, European leftists have bent over backwards to demonstrate their non-racism by opening their countries borders' to enormous waves of immigrants from countries with cultural beliefs and practices diametrically oppose to those cultivated by Europeans at a great cost over the past millenium. The result: Theo Von Gogh's murder (see below).

The Vlaams Blok will retool its message slightly for the relaunch, AFP notes:

Instead of pushing for the forcible expulsion of non-European immigrants, in future it will demand the departure of minorities "who reject, deny or fight against culture and European values like the separation of church and state, freedom of expression and equality between men and women", it said.

Once upon a time, that wouldn't have been considered unreasonable, or xenophobic. It would have been considered common sense.

Monday, November 08, 2004

No More Pretense!

"It's absurd that (the United States) is spending as much as it's spending to stop immigration flows that can't be stopped … instead of using that money on real threats that pose risks for both countries."

These are the words Mexican Interior Secretary Santiago Creel said to reporters as a high-level U.S. delegation arrived in Mexico City over the weekend to discuss bilateral relations between the two countries. In Secretary Creel's mind it is "absurd" for the U.S. to want to defend its borders - and it's pointless anyway, since Mexicans will continue to pour across the U.S.-Mexico border whether the U.S. wants them to or not. Well, at least the Mexican government no longer feels compelled to hide its intentions behind diplomatic language. Is there any way that this cannot be described as an invasion?

And what will President Bush do in his second term to defend the U.S. southern border and stem this inflow of illegal immigrants who are bankrupting American public services and driving down the wages and living conditions of lower class workers? Answer: Nothing - except maybe kowtow before Vincente Fox in an even more humiliating manner than he did in the first term. This is what now passes for conservatism.

Al Qaeda in Arizona?

The November issue of Arizona Monthy contains a fascinating article probing the unsettling idea that Islamic militants have been using the Grand Canyon State as an international nexus for decades. The article notes that the 9/11 Commission report cites Arizona 59 times and that the CIA and FBI collaborated on a still-classified report titled Arizona: Long Range Nexus for Islamic Extremists. What exactly has drawn Islamists to Arizona remains a topic of speculation, but terrorist experts appear confident that they have taken root in the state:

It’s not clear quite how or why the state has attracted what seems to be more than its fair share of individuals linked to terrorist organizations over the years. Experts have posited that the familiar desert climate; the anonymity provided by life in cities outside New York, California, and D.C.; and the easy access to a wealth of flight-training schools all played a role. But the most ominous explanation came from FBI agent Kenneth Williams, the author of the now infamous “Phoenix Memo.” In his testimony to a congressional committee in 2003, he said, “These people don’t continue to come back to Arizona because they like the sunshine or they like the state. I believe that something was established there, and I think it’s been there for a long time.”

According to the article, the focus of Islamist activities in Arizona may be the Islamic Center of Tucson, located close to the University of Tucson, one of the nation's leading academic institutions, with a strong focus in the hard sciences.

The Center’s current leadership says the terrorists who have indisputably found their way to its gold-domed mosque across the street from a U of A dormitory and next to a Carl’s Jr. have nothing to do with the 8,000 or so Muslims living in Tucson. But that assessment is not universally shared. State law-enforcement agencies and the FBI have conducted numerous investigations in Arizona since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and many of those centered on Tucson and the ICT’s well-documented, sordid history of attracting extremists.

The article details the movement of a number of Al Qaeda-associated individuals in Arizona prior to the September 11th attacks and raises troubling questions about the number of such individuals still residing covertly within the state. More disturbing is the thought that these individuals were allowed to immigrate freely, without any oversight or question, to the U.S. and establish themselves within America's borders. If Americans find themselves stunned to read about the ease with which Islamic extremists have moved around their country, sowing the seeds of jihad, they might want to ask their government why immigration standards were lowered and enforcement of immigration laws all but abandoned. In the wake of the atrocities of September 11th, they might also want to ask why immigration controls have only been marginally tightened and why defense of the southern border (on which Arizona sits) has been so pointedly ignored in Washington. If there's a murderer running loose in town (or a pack of hungry wolves, to use a Bush-campaign metaphor) isn't closing and locking one's doors the first logical step?

Sunday, November 07, 2004

The 10th Anniversary You Didn’t Read About

Ten years ago last month, The Free Press published a seminal book in social policy called The Bell Curve(TBC).If you’ve heard about TBC at all in the mainstream press, you’ve likely heard it described as a racist polemic that condemned blacks as intellectually inferior using the “pseudo-science” of I.Q.Shortly after its publication, TBC was relentlessly assailed by left-wing social scientists, who declared its premises racist, its science unsound and its motives right-wing.

Written by social scientists Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, TBC began with the idea that intelligence is heritable (genetic), and proceeded examine the consequences for society when high intelligence becomes the primary determinant of socioeconomic success. In fact, demonstrating the emergence of a high-I.Q. “cognitive elite” occupies the majority of the book.Only a single chapter dwelt on differences in I.Q. among racial groups, and here Murray and Herrnstein declared themselves agnostics regarding the exact origins of those differences.Nevertheless, TBC’s critics seized upon this chapter and declared the entire book an attempt to justify white supremacy.

Numerous academic articles and a small flurry of hastily assembled books, now almost all forgotten, furiously denounced Murray and Herrnstein and TBC.Much of the criticism devoted itself to linking some of the research quoted in TBC to various right-wing foundations (often viciously described as “neo-Nazi") and questioning Murray and Herrnstein’s ideological associations (Herrnstein was a conservative; Murray is a libertarian).Of course, few of these critics ever pointed out their own leftist orientation.It was scarcely mentioned, for instance, that the late evolutionary biologist and vocal TBC detractor Stephen J. Gould was an avowed Marxist, an ideology that cannot abide the notion of innate inequalities, a predisposition which might just possibly have colored his opinion.Interestingly, most conservatives declined to join in the fray – perhaps warded off by the threat of being denounced as racists.Conservative John McLaughlin of TV’s The McLaughlin Group dismissed TBC curtly, "It is largely pseudo-scientific and it is singularly unhelpful."Facing unpopular facts can be “unhelpful” if you don’t like being called a racist.

Almost twenty years earlier, evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson found himself on the receiving end of the left’s fury when he advanced the idea that human behavior might be rooted in human biology as shaped by evolution.Wilson advanced his ideas in a 1975 book called Sociobiology.The book sparked a firestorm.Academic tirades accused Wilson of providing a defense for slavery, genocide, Nazi eugenics, racism and sexism; protestors targeted Wilson at speaking appearances, infamously dousing him with a pitcher of water at a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.However, sociobiology has flourished in the nearly three decades since Wilson published Sociobiology and his ideas have gained widespread acceptance as the evidence in their favor has mounted.Oddly enough, though many conservatives (most notably social scientist James Q. Wilson) have invoked sociobiology in their analysis of social issues, a rising challenge to sociobiology now appears to be escalating from the right where evolution-denying creationism in the guise of “intelligent design theory” threatens to do for conservative thought what Lysenko-ism did for Soviet science.

Ten years later, discussion of TBC has all but disappeared from the mainstream media.However, many of the ideas proffered in TBC have quietly emerged from the shadows.The idea that intelligence (along with personality traits and many mental disorders) have strong genetic components is no longer a heretical notion, though in depth talk of I.Q. remains decidedly beyond the bounds of politically correct discussion.In his 2002 bestseller, The Blank Slate, MIT professor of psychology Steven Pinker observes:

“… there is now ample evidence that intelligence is a stable property of an individual, that it can be linked to certain features of the brain (including overall size, amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes, speed of neural conduction, and metabolism of cerebral glucose), that it is partly heritable among individuals, and that it predicts some of the variation in life outcomes such as income and social status.”

This, of course, is simply a somewhat more moderate recapitulation of Murray and Herrnstein's underlying premise.